The production of electrical and electronic circuit boards often requires the mounting of several multilead electrical and electronic components on substrates having apertures adapted to receive the component's leads. Usually, such mounting techniques involve manual insertion of the leads of each multilead component in corresponding holes or apertures of the substrate or the circuit board. Electronic components and devices, such as semiconductor integrated circuit (I.C.) packages, are becoming small in size resulting in substantially smaller size leads. Moreover, the number of leads on each one of such IC packages has been increasing to achieve higher packaging densities. The miniaturization of the IC packages renders unattractive any technique using manual insertion of the leads into the circuit board. Indeed, in a manufacturing environment, such a technique would yield small throughput, would be time consuming and labor intensive, and would cause substantial problems of operator fatigue.
Several attempts were made to avoid the above hindrances of manual insertion of multilead components into circuit boards by resorting to automation. In the area of automatically mounting the multilead component or the I.C. package on a printed wiring board (PWB), the emphasis has been to accurately align and position all the leads of the component or the I.C. package over the receiving mating holes in the PWB. Typically, once the holes and the component's leads are aligned, a downward force is applied to the component in order to simultaneously push its leads into their corresponding receiving mating holes of the PWB. One necessary condition for the successful implementation of such known technique is that not a single lead of the component may be bent. Another necessary condition is that very strict positioning tolerances must be respected in order to align the leads and the holes to successfully insert each lead into its corresponding hole. Clearly, such strict positioning requirements do not and cannot compensate for any dimensional deviations existing between the outer housing of the component or package and its leads.
Therefore, there exists a need for a simple, accurate, and reliable technique for inserting a multilead component into a PWB while substantially avoiding the above-discussed strict requirements.